Category Archives: Society

Sep 03 2014
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Politics, Society

What is the measure of true leadership?

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If New Brunswick’s economic morass demonstrates anything it is that, as the province careens from one predictable trauma to another, true leadership is becoming as rare as snow in Sudan.

Worse, perhaps, than genuine ignorance, virtually everyone saw this wall of debt from a distance – the current government, previous ones, pundits, political scientists, my Great Aunt Minnie – and those who had the authority and tools to knock it down, instead, laid more brick and mortar.

Some years ago, during the depth of the financial crisis that, overnight, wiped out trillions of dollars in private equity, the sad spectacle of Alan Greenspan – the once mighty head of the U.S. Federal Reserve – admitting to a Congressional Committee that his once unshakeable faith in the planet’s economic order had been thoroughly undermined in just a few, short weeks was shocking, indeed.

Now, we almost expect our leaders and heros to reliably fail us. Across North America and Europe, unemployment remain stubbornly high, the income gap between the rich and the rest continues to widen, consumer debt is at an all-time high. The tent-angry 99 per cent have folded up their makeshift cities and gone home.

In fact, as bobble-headed experts inform us from their studio couches on TV the economic diseases which afflict us are so complex, so systemic, so globally entrenched that it’s unlikely any policy, of any so-called leader, can accurately prescribe a cure. So, the thinking goes, why bother even trying?

All of which cuts to the core of our current problem: A growing distrust not only of our existing cohort of movers and shakers, but of the leadership principle, itself. 

Unlike every other malignancy that’s spread through our ailing economy, this fretful cynicism forecasts the early death of our various bodies politic, if only because we now need a calibre of leadership we haven’t seen in decades: Talented men and women in all professions and vocations stepping forward and risking their reputations in the sea of scorn that’s sweeping the planet; tough-minded, innovative, perspicacious individuals charting newer, smarter, more sustainable courses for businesses, governments, schools, and universities in the years ahead.

And yet, the question is not so much who emerges to fill these roles, but how society regains its confidence in new leaders – the confidence to recognize those who are the real deals, and those who are the carnival barkers. Given how wrong almost everyone has been about almost everything over the past decade, it’s a brutally tough assignment; but it’s not impossible.

What, in fact, makes a true leader? Is it vision, passion, discipline, persistence? Is it strength, courage, loyalty, rhetorical flourish? These are all important traits. But while these qualities may be necessary for enlightened, trustworthy leadership, they are not necessarily sufficient.

Consider, for example, a man who “persistently” pursues short-term profits at the expense of long-term revenues. Or a women who “courageously” champions a policy, program or technology despite the fact that her competitors are manifestly more successful performing the same functions. Are these the leaders we need, or do they represent too much of what we already have in the boardrooms of the world’s Burger Kings and Tim Hortons?

In fact, the true measure of leadership on the precariously uneven playing field of the modern era will be knowledge, understanding, responsibility, and cooperation.

Knowledge of the way this province’s finances really work. Understanding of the means to achieve a productive balance between free enterprise principles and regulatory protections. Responsibility for getting to the truth of the threats – sooner rather than later – that would injure our collective hopes, expectations and livelihoods.

And cooperation – always cooperation – not partisan hatcheting.

The notion that any man or woman owns the right to break the world as long as he or she is strong enough or smart enough to get away with it should have died along with the careers of Alan Greenspan and all his other Ayn Rand-loving ilk. 

Now, in this New Brunswick election cycle, we must look to ourselves for the leadership we seek, and become the heroes of our own lives.

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Aug 18 2014
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Politics, Society

The prodigal pothead returns

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Stoners say the darnedest things. Take Marc Emery, for example. He’s Canada’s “Prince of Pot”, just released from a four-and-a-half-year long American hoosegow, courtesy of the state of Mississippi.

“Everywhere I go there have been well-wishers, even people who I don’t think agree with marijuana legalization think that maybe it’s a bit rough to have someone go away for five years over seeds,” the activist, who was sent up the river for running a mail-order marijuana seed company, told a reporter for the Toronto Sun last week.

Still, that was mild in comparison to other things he has said. Just ask Margaret Wente, the Globe and Mail’s delightfully irascible current affairs columnist. In one of her commentaries last week, she wrote, “Despite the public adulation, Mr. Emery is among the most obnoxious jerks in Canadian public life,” she wrote. “And I say this as someone who thinks it’s past time to relax the laws on weed.

“He’s a relentless self-promoter who’s compared himself to Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He insists that the persecution of people who smoke pot is the moral equivalent of the persecution of the Jews.

“In his most despicable, he called Irwin Cotler, the former federal justice minister, a ‘Nazi-Jew’ for allowing the United States to extradite him. Mr. Cotler is a Liberal who campaigns passionately against anti-Semitism.”

Well, gee, Peggy, why not try saying what’s on your mind for a change?

Methinks, however, her larger point is that because Mr. Emery is so objectionable  (at least to her), his support for legalizing pot undermines the principle, itself. This is a neat trick of tortured logic that some of us in the screed-making game make from time to time (me included).

Much has changed since Mr. Emery went to prison. Colorado and Washington has legalized marijuana for recreational use. President Barack Obama has openly joked about his yputhful adventures with weed, apparently to no ill effect on his standing in public opinion pools, which, in any case, couldn’t get much worse. And federal Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is calling to make the stuff legit.

And why not? Actual experts on this subject generally reject the proposition that the billions of dollars governments in Canada and the United States have spent fighting the so-called drug war over the past 30-or-more years have been worthy investments.

According to the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy last year, its “researchers reviewed two decades of global drug surveillance data, finding that the supply of major illegal drugs has increased, as measured through a decline in the price, while there has been a corresponding general increase in the purity of illegal drugs.”

This moved the Centre’s Scientific Chair Dr. Evan Wood (a co-author of the study) to state: “These findings add to the growing body of evidence that the war on drugs has failed. We should look to implement policies that place community health and safety at the forefront of our efforts, and consider drug use a public health issue rather than a criminal justice issue. With the recognition that efforts to reduce drug supply are unlikely to be successful, there is a clear need to scale up addiction treatment and other strategies that can effectively reduce drug-related harm.”

In fact, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brazil and Chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, agreed when he stated: “In response to a study like this, policymakers often say ‘drugs are harmful so they must be kept illegal’. What they fail to consider is, as this and other research suggests, that drugs are more harmful – to society, individuals, and the taxpayer – precisely because they are illegal. Some European countries have taken steps to decriminalize various drugs, and these types of policies should be explored in Latin and North America as well.”

Already, a sizable chunk of Canadians support decriminalizing pot, if not actually legalizing it.

All of which is to say that Mr. Emery can yak on about anything that fancies him. That’s what a man on a mission (a.k.a. media hound) does, stoned or not. It won’t affect  the ultimate outcome.

On this issue, if with few others, the momentum of the age is with common sense.

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Aug 13 2014
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Humour, Society

The incredible shrinking man mourns our dietary obsessions

Big and bigger cavemen rejoice

Big and bigger cavemen rejoice

If I were a caveman, living 30,000 years ago, I would, in all likelihood, resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s and not Woody Allen in the 1970s. That’s because my caveman antecedent (and Arnold) ate meat, eggs, nuts, fruit and that’s about it; whereas Woody and I ate bagels.

I can’t speak for one of my favorite (if diminutive) filmmakers, but Elizabeth Kolbert can. She’s a staffer at the New Yorker magazine. She’s also a former Fulbright scholar and, recently, the author of “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History”.

So, I assume she knows what she’s talking about when she pronounces, as she does in a recent issue of her esteemed organ, “According to a study of human remains from China and Japan, the height of the average person declined by more than three inches during the millennia in which rice cultivation intensified. According to another study, of bones from Mesoamerica, women’s heights dropped by three inches and men’s by two inches as farming spread.”

Indeed, she writes, “A recent survey of more than twenty studies on this subject, published in the journal Economics and Human Biology, found that the adoption of agriculture ‘was observed to decrease stature in populations from across the entire globe,’ including in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and South America.”

And that’s not all: “Early farmers were not just shorter than hunter-gatherers; they were also more sickly. They had worse teeth – one analysis from the Near East suggests that the incidence of cavities jumped sixfold as people started relying on grain – and they suffered from increased rates of anemia and infectious disease. Many now familiar infections – measles, for instance – require high population densities to persist; thus, it wasn’t until people established towns and cities that such ‘crowd epidemic diseases’ could flourish. And, by living in close proximity to their equally crowded farm animals, early agriculturalists helped to bring into being a whole set of diseases that jumped from livestock to people.”

In fact, according to Ms. Kolbert and her expert authorities, it took thousands of years for humankind to recover its physical stature following the so-called Agricultural Revolution of the Neolithic Age.

To be clear, it took me only 27 months to get to a fighting, palaeolithic, trim weight of 150 pounds (waist size of 30 inches), from a relatively corpulent 180 pounds (waist size of. . .well, let’s just say, capable of eclipsing my view of my shoe tips). I did it by obsessively exercising daily and adjusting my diet and portion sizes.

As a result, my blood pressure is delightfully low (when, not too long ago, it was alarmingly high), my cholesterol is standing where it did when I was a callow youth of 17. I have more energy and enthusiasm for everything (which is fortunate, given that my beautiful daughters and their husbands have, in the past five years, given me four grandchildren).

I still stand only five-foot-nine and a bit on a good day (nothing I can do about that – thanks Agricultural Revolution!). But, generally, I feel pretty good for a man who’s about to matriculate into his 54th year.

But here’s the thing: The so-called paleo-diet fad has conquered the affluent corner of the western world, and to almost fascistic effect.

As Ms. Kolbert writes: “In promoting red meat and rejecting grains, the paleo diet challenges just about every precept that nutritionists have been pushing for the past fifty years. In effect, it turns the familiar food pyramid on its point. This is an increasingly common inversion, if not in academic circles or at the U.S. Department of Agriculture then on the talk-show circuit. In his wildly popular manifesto-cum-recipe book, ‘Grain Brain,’ David Perlmutter, a Naples, Florida, neurologist, maintains that sandwiches are not just hard on the digestive system; they wreak havoc on the mind. ‘Modern grains are silently destroying your brain,’ he writes. ‘Basically, I am calling what is arguably our most beloved dietary staple a terrorist group.’”

Is he joking? Does Woody Allen know about this?

Chill out, doc. The chances are that your inner caveman will appreciate the odd P-P-J on Wonder Bread, if only to prove that the species is just a tad more digestively adaptable than a young Arnold would allow.

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Jul 04 2014
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Society

Canada’s civically disengaged citizenry

 

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The stunning news isn’t that New Brunswick’s citizens comprise the second-most civically engaged population in Canada (only Prince Edward Islanders are more inclined to head to the polls). 

The stunning news us that we manage to pull off that feat with a score of only 5.2 out of 10 relative to other regions in an international assessment of voting habits. 

The tidings come courtesy of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s new “interactive” website which lets users compare and contrast their region’s performance according to eight indicators of “well-being”: Civic engagement, access to services, safety, health, income, environment, jobs, and education.

According to the Paris-based group of countries established in 1961 to promote world industry and trade, P.E.I. ranks 6.6 in its fondness for the polling station, followed by New Brunswick and, then, in shamefully descending order: Quebec, 4.5; Nova Scotia, 4.3; Ontario, 4.2; British Columbia, 4.0; Manitoba, 3.8; Alberta, 3.0; Northwest Territories, 2.6; Newfoundland and Labrador, 2.3; and Nunavut, 0.9.

This puts New Brunswick in the bottom 47 per cent of the entire OECD. Still, that’s nothing compared with Canada as a whole. Among the OECD’s 34 member countries, ours ranked 26.

Moreover, “concerning inequalities across regions in civic engagement, Canada is in position 25/33.” That’s doing just slightly better than Chile and Mexico. Meanwhile, Estonia, Poland and the Czech Republic continue to eat our lunch at the ballot box.

Of course, the news isn’t all bad. 

 The OECD says, among member regions, New Brunswick occupies the top 31, 29, 10, 33, 39, and 33 per cent, respectively, for access to services, education, environment, income, health, and safety.           

The province’s mortality rate is eight deaths per 1,000 people. The murder rate is one in 100,000. Life expectancy is 80 years. Meanwhile, in Canada, only Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador boast cleaner environments.

As for dear, old Canuckistan, compared with the rest of the OECD pack ours is the fifth-richest, eighth-cleanest and eight healthiest nation.

Naturally, not everyone is buying what the OECD is selling. “If people think, as a result of this, OK now we’ve got the definitive statement of where New Brunswick ranks in Canada, well then they’ve really got it wrong and that’s actually dangerous,” Ronald Colman executive director of the Genuine Progress Indicator for Atlantic Canada, told the Telegraph-Journal this week. “Everyone likes simplicity, everyone likes quick results. . .but it can be a little bit tricky if you run roughshod over some of the more detailed and important evidence.”

In fact, regarding the OECD’s definition of civic engagement, Mr. Colman wonders whether the organization is missing some useful nuance. “I would go so far as to say if you have very poor choices at the polls – if you have two bad choices – maybe not voting could be a sign of the poor quality of the candidates rather than voter apathy. . .You can’t just use one indicator to demonstrate something.”

With respect to Mr. Colman, that dog won’t hunt.

A poor field of candidates is never a legitimate reason for not voting. If it were, then citizens of this country would have had to resign themselves to their ill-fitting, authoritarian yokes long ago. 

Besides, in the parlors of party politics, one man’s poutine is another man’s poison. I’m not especially enamored of regressive, scare-mongering right-wingers. My neighbour, with whom I get along just fine as long as we don’t discuss his theories about roving bands of juvenile delinquents, thinks they’re swell. 

Who’s right? Who knows? Does any of this curtail our choices in this democracy to the point of nullification?  

Inasmuch as any respected, 52-year-old economic development organization’s statistics are trustworthy, I’m prepared to take the OECD’s findings about Canada’s comparatively poor showing as a civically engaged society at face value.

More’s the pity. 

In a world where wars and sectarian savagery have turned 50 million men, women and children into refugees – the largest number since the end of WWII – the right to vote is an increasingly precious commodity.

Certainly, it’s no mere bauble for tossing away when irked.

 

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Jun 16 2014
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Government, Politics, Society

When some are more equal than others

 

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It is one of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s favorite yakking points. NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair bangs on about it every chance he gets. Even Canada’s esteemed Prime Minister Stephen Harper has raised the subject, albeit delicately, in public from time to time.

Now the worthy Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has jumped into the fray in its first country report on the Great White North in two years: Canada is, indeed, a nation of unequal opportunity and in all the ways that matter.

While “Canadians enjoy high levels of well-being and social progress” and though all of the country’s “component scores exceed the OECD average,” the report also concludes that “disposable income inequality has increased by considerably more in Canada since 1995 (11 per cent) than in other countries with data (2 per cent) to a level that is now 12th highest in the OECD.” 

What’s more, “in an era of high commodity prices has created wide regional economic disparities, while much of the public revenues from non-renewable 

resource extraction are spent on current government programmes, rather than being saved for the benefit of future generations. Incomes have risen in resource-rich provinces, but the resulting currency appreciation has placed pressures on manufacturing.”

The nation’s traditional mechanism for redistributing wealth from have to have-not provinces, federal equalization transfers, “only partially offset inter-provincial disparities in fiscal capacity.”

Housing is a special concern, says the organization. Prices in major cities, especially Vancouver and Toronto, are preposterously out of sync with the asset wealth that underpins homes and condominiums there, raising the specter of a market bubble and subsequent crash. 

If that happens, only banks and other lenders will prosper, thanks to Canada’s uniquely generous mortgage insurance system which guarantees institutions 100 per cent payback in the event of loan default – a circumstance that if repeated often enough would, itself, accelerate the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us poor schlubs.

Still, whenever politicians and pundits grumble about income inequality – which U.S. President Barack Obama has termed the “greatest threat” to contemporary society – other members of the chattering class are sure to point out that sour grapes never helped anyone, rich or poor.

Unerringly, they cleave to arguments that justify, legitimize or merely accept disparity as a fact of life. 

Writing in the Washington Post earlier this year, economist Joann Weiner cited four reasons why Mr. Obama is sort of stuck. 

First, America  is a “Great Gatsby” nation where “the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.” Second, “winning the ‘birth lottery’ is the biggest factor in determining” one’s like pay grade in life. Third, birds of a feather flock together; rich, educated, people marry other rich, educated people. And fourth, the uneducated are unlikely to reverse their fortunes because college has become too expensive to pursue. 

Ironically, though, these conditions, which hamper efforts to inject the system with greater equity, are themselves the product the widening disparity that first appeared in the late 1970s thanks to what former U.S. Labour Secretary Robert Reich and others have identified as two concurrent developments: the appearance of spectacular, new business technologies; and a wholesale assault on private unions.

The former lowered labour costs, while the latter undermined wages and job security. Consequently, as Mr. Reich notes on his blog, “We are heading back to levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. The pertinent question is not whether income and wealth inequality is good or bad. It is at what point do these inequalities become so great as to pose a serious threat to our economy, our ideal of equal opportunity and our democracy.”

In fact, the best practical reason why everyone, from the improbably wealthy to the grudgingly poor, should worry about disparities in wealth and income is economic. Without a sturdy middle class around to keep buying the stuff rich people’s factories make, the whole game implodes.

Progressives among us are certainly not inured to the status quo. They note with confidence various fixes, including universal early childhood education to provide economically disadvantaged kids with the same start in life as their wealthy counterparts. 

The real question is whether our collective Trudeaus, Mulcairs and Harpers will ever be ready to put their money where their mouths are.

 

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Jun 11 2014
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Economy, Society

Seeing the forest in our urban trees

 

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The TD bank complex in downtown Toronto is the product of a procedural imagination, a throwback to the so-called international style of architecture that eschews all forms of ornamentation, especially those afforded by Mother Nature, herself.

How brilliantly ironic, then, that one of that institution’s senior officials, having for too long tolerated the glass and steel that frames his working life, now declares that trees are a city’s true salvation. 

But, then, that’s Craig Alexander for you. The senior vice-present and chief economist of Canada’s second-largest bank with a current market capitalization of $102 billion has been plunking away in the minor keys of capitalism for years, hoping to provoke more innovative and socially redeeming uses for the filthy lucre that makes the world go round. 

This time, he’s latched onto trees. 

“Urban forests play a much greater role than just beautifying the scenery,” he writes in a recent special report entitled, “Urban forests: the value of trees in the city of Toronto.” In fact, the “green space. . . is a critical factor in environmental condition, human health and the overall quality of life.”

According to Mr. Alexander’s research, 10 million trees from 116 different species comprise Hog Town’s urban forest, covering 30 per cent of the city. That’s about 16,000 trees per square kilometre, or four for every man, woman and child.       

What’s more, they’re worth a fortune. If you were to chop them all down and start over, you’d need to spend about $700 per tree or $7 billion in total to reforest places like the Don Valley, Highland Creek and Rouge River watersheds.

But why do that? “Beyond their value as a commodity,” Mr. Alexander asserts, “urban forests help ease the burden of managing snow, rain and other wet-weather flow by intercepting falling precipitation in their canopy, increasing the amount of water absorbed into the ground, and reducing soil erosion.”

And that’s not all. Trees generate oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide and scrub the air of other pollutants. In fact, each year, Toronto’s forest gobbles up 25 per cent of the city’s industrial emissions. That’s about equivalent to the exhaust from a million automobiles. “The amount of air pollution bated by Toronto’s urban forest generates an annual savings of $19 million  – just under $2 per tree,” Mr. Alexander notes.

Then, there is the efficacious effect trees have on property values, as they help moderate the micro-climates of leafy neighbourhoods and yield energy savings to homeowners. All in all, Mr. Alexander writes, “The City of Toronto’s urban forest. . .provides an additional $80 million of environmental benefits and cost savings each year. . .The annual maintenance cost of a tree is roughly $4.20. For every dollar spent on maintenance, trees return $3.20 to the community. . .Trees located in areas where it is difficult for them to grow – such as street(s) – return about $1.35 of benefits for  every dollar spent.”

So, the bottom line is, as this banker quips, “keeping the green on our streets, keeps the green in our wallets.”

Still, whenever I read one of Mr. Alexander’s informative, cheerfully written reports, I get the impression he’s talking about something bigger than just the subject on which he’s focussing. 

Two years ago, he authored a widely-quoted study on the long-term benefits of investing public money in structured, universally accessible early childhood education. His argument followed a familiar train: “High quality early childhood education (ECE) has widespread and long-lasting effects – not only for children, but for parents and the economy as a whole. . .For every dollar invested, analysis shows the return ranges from roughly $1.5 to almost $3, with the benefit ratio for disadvantaged children being in the double digits.”

There is a certain, hopeful subtext in all of this – the notion that our lives in this country needn’t be proscribed by the procedural manipulations of capital markets, and the cookie-cutter thinking these inevitably produce.

Sometimes, by dint of real imagination, we do spend money on the right things precisely to improve our lot and that of our neighbour. 

We do see the forest for the trees.

 

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May 14 2014
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Society

The time is for taking more responsibility

 

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When did everyone suddenly become so accountable?

Clearly, it happened on one of those occasions when we had our backs turned against the zeitgeist, when the arbiters of les mots du jour were feeling particularly shame-faced over some likely inconsequential misdemeanor. Now we’re stuck with one of the least inspiring measurements of virtue ever invented.

Politicians must be accountable, so must the governments they lead: To whom, exactly, is still a matter of some conjecture.

Corporate directors are nothing if not accountable to their shareholders whose interests they protect with quantities of vigor in direct proportion to the size of voting-class stock in play. 

Doctors are accountable to their patients, and patients are accountable to their insurers. Meanwhile, insurers are accountable to their (you guessed it) shareholders.

Teachers are accountable to their students. Students are accountable to their parents. Parents are accountable to their credit card companies, which, in turn, pay junior’s tuition and away-from-home living expenses.

To be accountable is to be answerable, subject, liable amenable, obligated, chargeable.

On the other hand, to be accountable is not necessarily to be responsible. There’s an important distinction between the two. 

Just ask Pasi Sahlberg, the Director General of Finland’s Centre for International Mobility – the centerpiece of its teacher education system. In an interview last year with American documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, the administrator was unequivocal:

“The Finnish language doesn’t have  word for ‘accountability’, particularly in education. Accountability is something this is left when responsibility is subtracted. In many places, people are getting education completely wrong when they think that stronger accountability – more testing, more evaluation, more penalties against teachers and principals – works.”

His bragging rights appear to be genuine. According to a piece in the Smithsonian magazine not long ago, “In 2000. . .the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.”

None of which explains why Finland dropped from first to twelfth in the world in last year’s PISA assessments, of course. But does that make Finnish educators accountable to a system that’s creaking or responsible for getting everybody, including themselves, back on track?

Personally, I prefer door number two in this and just about every other human game show in which people rely on one another’s good graces to get ahead.

In the latter part of the 20th Century, notions of accountability emerged in the sometimes indistinguishable fields of government, business, sports and entertainment when, it became appallingly clear, leaders and celebrities oftentimes shared the moral compass of an amoeba. 

Oh look, there’s Billy-Bod Clinton playing “chase the nubile political intern” in the Oval Office. What a dirtbag! Oh well, if we can’t make him more responsible, we can certainly hold him accountable. How do you spell impeachment, again? 

The current Canadian government adores the concept of accountability and all it implies. It even maintains something called a Management Accountability Framework that purportedly, “support(s) the management accountability of deputy heads” and 

“improve(s) management practices across departments and agencies,” though it’s not immediately clear how any of that works.

The problem with emphasizing accountability over good old fashioned responsibility is that, in a funny way, we let out ourselves off the hook. We imagine that as flawed, weak mortals, we will transgress in, as yet, uncountable ways, so we’d better have the woodshed site-ready for the inevitable floggings we’ll take. Once properly flogged, we’re again free to offend if, that is, we’re again prepared to face the consequences.  

Accountability assumes that punishment is the inevitable denouement of every story. Responsibility resides in the spiritual fortification where trust, faith, honor, duty, and charity still thrive.

There, with only the best of all possible luck, we may find the next generation of political leaders. 

 

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Apr 22 2014
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Government, Society

Putting the true profit motive back into government

 

At some point during their long campaign to regain the relevance they once enjoyed in western society, progressive liberals of the social-democratic mien finally wised-up to the fact that filthy lucre, not moral suasion, makes the world go round.

Specifically, unless they can link improvements in living standards, literacy and child care to actual wealth creation, they might as well go home and write folk songs for all the influence they’ll wield.

The money principle has been the genius of the counter-counter-culture that began with the reign of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, continued under the “everything goes” administration of Bill Clinton, persisted during the corporatist eras of the daddy-son Bush tag-team of George and Georgie W. It now languishes in Barack Obama’s uncertain hands. 

The fundamental idea was, and is, that Government is, at best, a necessary evil. Most of the time it’s just evil by nature – wasteful, tyrannical, ineffective. 

The “market” was, and is, mankind’s true salvation. Individuals, properly motivated through low taxation, will solve their own problems.

In this conception of reality, welfare is for weaklings, schools are for learnin’ the three Rs and, higher education is for snooty elites unless it leads to a job at a billion-dollar tech firm in Silicon Valley.

Or, as the late Margaret Thatcher once opined, “We want a society where people are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. This is what we mean by a moral society; not a society where the state is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the state.”

Lately, though, that notion has been turning on its head.

Andre Picard, the Globe and Mail’s award-winning public health reporter, recently quoted from a study underwritten by the Mental Health Commission of Canada. The findings were startling.

“For every $1 spent providing housing and support for a homeless person with sever mental illness, $2.17 in savings are reaped because they spend less time in hospital, in prison and in shelters,” Mr. Picard reported earlier this month.

“People who are severely mentally ill and chronically homeless use a lot of services – an average of $225,000 a year, according to research. Providing housing and support is costly too – an average of $19,582 per person. But the avoided costs are much greater, $42,536 on average, because those who are housed are put in hospital less often, make fewer ER visits and do not use shelters as often. . .For people with less severe mental illness and lesser needs, 96 cents is saves for every additional $1 spent on housing.”

The results suggest that, contrary to the opinions of nanny-state decriers, Government’s obligations to provide safe, reliable housing to the erstwhile homeless is not only moral – it’s also financial, as the investment yields an enviable return for all taxpayers.

Apparently, that’s something even a Harperite can get behind. 

“We can do more – not just manage homelessness, but eliminate it altogether,” Candice Bergen, federal minister of social development, said at the study’s unveiling in Ottawa on April 8. “I’m realistic. I know there will always be people who will be homeless and who will need help. But most people can recover, they can get back on their feet.”

Lately, the same line of reasoning has been leaking from commentaries by the unlikeliest sources: economists. 

When TD Bank Group’s Craig Alexander is not talking about the dollars-and-cents benefits of structured, universally accessible early childhood education, he’s pointing out the enormous costs to society of structural, endemic illiteracy.

Halting it, he recently told a business crowd in Saint John, “raises your income, which ends up creating a better standard of living. You invest in people. You improve their skills. You give them the ability to be much more productive. It’s good for business.”

It’s also good for the state – which, for all practical purposes, means all of us.

 

 

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Apr 18 2014
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Economy, Oil and Gas, Society

The risky business of economies planning for the future

 

A credible line of thinking among economists who are not enamored of their political reputations holds that governments bent on producing surpluses, come what may, are misguided, even morally bankrupt.

The argument goes something like this: Publicly elected officials and their bureaucratic minions produce nothing fungible; therefore, they should produce no returns. Rather, their function is to collect taxes responsibly and distribute the funds for the general good – to the rich, the poor and the rest of us. 

The general good comprises the schools we attend, the clinics we need, the roads we use, the parks we frequent, and the safe streets and gathering places we expect as dues-paying members of just and enlightened societies. 

In other words, there should plenty of work to occupy the minds of those we pay through the ballot box and those who serve the periodic democratic lotteries we call general elections. And, in this line of argument, ideally there should be nothing left in the kitty at the end of the political day. All money is absorbed, all money is spent. No deficit, no debt and, crucially, no surplus.

Except, of course, the system doesn’t work this way, anywhere.

But what if it did? Sort of. 

A reader writes, “I have been to Norway several times. By the way, Norway has some of the highest retail gas prices going and don’t even think about buying booze over there. Hard stuff was $50 per 750 ml 15 years ago and God help you if you did not bring in your duty-free limited when visiting.”

Still, as this reader points out, that Nordic country of just over five million souls has just now demonstrated (on paper, at least) that, thanks to its public sector’s perspicacity, attention and drive, each of its citizens is a millionaire, and will likely remain in that vaunted economic status for some time, as New Brunswick’s and Greece’s economies meet on the slide to perdition.

That doesn’t mean Norwegians get to cash in, individually; it means that Norwegians, collectively, get to enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, the chance that their children will be among the most highly educated in the world, the certainty that their health care will cost less for the benefits they receive than almost any other place in the world and that old-age peace of mind is actually, well, fungible. 

Here’s what the U.K.’s Daily Mail online edition had to say about the development in early January:

“Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has ballooned so much due to high oil and gas prices that every person in the country became a theoretical millionaire this week. The nation is proving to be an exception as others struggle under a mountain of debts. Set up in 1990, the fund owns around one per cent of the world’s stocks, as well as bonds and real estate from London to Boston. The surplus revenue is collected in the Government Pension Fund Global.”

Said Finance Minister Siv Jensen in an email to reporters: “Many countries have found that temporary large revenues from natural resource exploitation produce relatively short-lived booms that are followed by difficult adjustments.” Added Oeystein Doerum, chief economist at DNB Markets: “The fund is a success in the sense that parliament has managed to put aside money for the future. There are many examples of countries that have not managed that.”

Indeed, there are. 

Canada’s legislators drone on endlessly about this nation’s enormous natural resource potential. New Brunswick Premier David Alward almost begs citizens of this province to embrace the opportunities (as yet, unrealized) in shale gas development.

But what, exactly, is he and his confreres elsewhere in this country doing about securing the long-term efficacy such massive developments might contribute to social development: education, skills training, economic diversification, even (and most paradoxically) strategies to employ the windfalls from oil and gas to wean us off oil and gas with brave, interesting, new, renewable energy technologies?

So far, the genius of our political leaders seems confined to balancing the books, perhaps achieving small surpluses at some indeterminate point in the extenuated future. 

The risk of bankruptcy in this endeavor is not merely fiscal; it’s moral.

 

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Apr 08 2014
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Culture, Society

What’s wrong with Gen Y? Their parents

 

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Wrapped in caution tape and kept far away from even the least consequential threats mankind invents on a quotidian basis, our children are forever doomed to lives of neurotic self-absorption. Forget saving the planet from the depredations their parents and grandparents have bequeathed.

At least, that’s the thinking, these days, among certain leftish-leaning editors, writers and, presumably, readers who bemoan the softening of youthful spines across these vast and trust-fund-encumbered lands.

Funny that – the thinking, I mean; as it seems so down-to-earth, not at all like the vaulted prose the bloody-minded right wing assumes progressives embrace with relish (and sometimes dijon). 

But there it was, in all its small-l liberal glory: An article brimming with genuinely fretful observations about lost childhood in sea of otherwise confident, consumer-driven print journalism for upwardly mobile adults.

“Hey parents, leave those kids alone” demands the display copy in Hanna Rosin’s cover story in April edition of The Atlantic. “In the past generation, the rising preoccupation with children’s safety has transformed childhood, stripping it of independence, risk-taking, and discovery. What’s been gained is unclear: rates of injury have remained fairly stead since the 1970s, and abduction by strangers was as rare then as it is now. What’s been lost is creativity, passion and courage. Now a countermovement is arising, based on mounting evidence that today’s parenting norms do children more harm than good.”

So, let me get this straight. The generation of parents who think that offering youngsters metal-spiked lawn darts and the opportunity to play helmut-less hockey is tantamount to child abuse is, nevertheless, reconsidering its position on the subject of juvenile risk-taking – as in, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to let junior remove the training wheels from his trike. 

In other words, this generation of parents is suddenly worrying too much about worrying too much. Does anything say “baby-boomer” better than that?

“It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation,” Ms. Rosin writes. “Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ‘70s – walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap – are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of ‘children’s independent mobility,’ conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 per cent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to nine per cent, and now it’s even lower.” 

Another piece in the same issue of the magazine quotes from a “ground-breaking study” that recently found parents to be responsible for their kids’ lousy performance in school: “Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire – regardless of a parent’s race, class, or level of education. . .Once kids enter middle school, parental help with homework can actually bring test scores down, an effect Robinson says could be caused by the fact that many parents may have forgotten, or never truly understood, the material their children learn in school.”

How much of this actually rings true for most people, and how much is actually phantasmagoria fueled by an increasingly rarified combination of generational guilt and healthy disposable incomes is hard to say. 

But we of the chattering classes do like to see perils and trends (indeed, perilous trends are among our favorite preoccupations) where none actually exist, or, at least, manifest themselves much in the general population.

Looking out my office window onto my residential neighbourhood, heavily peopled with rug rats of various shapes and sizes, I see games of tag, war, hide and seek; occasional punching, slapping and kicking. I see scraped elbows, skinned knees and bruised foreheads.

     I don’t see pampered darlings under escort to various play-dates. I don’t see adult authority figures brokering cease fires on the battlefields of childhood dreams. 

All of which is to say that “the overprotected kid” might be more myth than reality. On the other hand, “the anxiety-riddled adult” is all too common, indeed.

 

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